My Vegas nightmare: high heels, the Strip and no cabs in sight
Add to ...

Sometimes things don’t go as planned – and those moments often make for the best stories. Tripping columns offer readers a chance to share their wild adventures from the road.

We must have taken a wrong turn in the casino.

Maybe we were still high on Love, Cirque du Soleil’s celebration of the Beatles. Maybe we were just following the wrong crowd (we wouldn’t be the first to be led astray in Las Vegas), but whatever the reason, we ended up leaving the Mirage at a different spot from where the cab had dropped us off.

More Related to this Story

There were no doormen. No line of cabs waiting to whisk us down the Strip to our Vegas hotel. So we just started walking. After all, our hotel was just a few doors down, it was a beautiful night and my heels were comfortable – I had danced the night away in these very same shoes.

Besides, I was all dressed up and a stroll down the strip would be like walking down a catwalk. Vegas, baby!

I flipped my hair, turned right and we joined some of the 20-million people who rubberneck down Las Vegas Boulevard every year.

Next door in the manicured gardens of Caesar’s Palace, we wonder what the Roman general would make of the Eiffel Tower across the street. At least 10 minutes later we are still hailing Caesar. It’s a 13-hectare site and my model strut is becoming less sure, more sore. But I try to stay light on my (open) toes, buoyed by the energy, the crowds and the lights – the sheer spectacle of the strip.

Eventually, we’re in front of the next hotel, the Bellagio. The catwalk is forgotten and I’m lurching forward, zombie-like, but at least we don’t have to weave through the crowds. Hundreds of people are pressed up against the stone railing watching the Bellagio fountains perform a water ballet to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

I sing along to tangerine trees and marmalade skies, and I very much wish for a newspaper taxi to appear on the shore. Alas, that’s not how it works here. Hailing cabs is illegal in Vegas, the only thing that is. But what’s really criminal is thinking these shoes were comfortable.

Two hotels left. Suddenly the people waiting to take elevators up to the overpass walkways aren’t as silly as I thought they were earlier in the day – when I was wearing flip-flops.

I consider taking my shoes off. Just for a second. I pause longer than I should outside Chanel and consider dropping a mortgage payment on comfortable-looking boots. Step by agonizing step we are – finally – at our hotel.

But there is no entrance off the Strip. We either have to walk all the way around the corner, which at this point is akin to climbing Everest, or hop a rather large glass railing to get to the hotel driveway a metre below the street.

Wait! There’s an elevator that descends that metre. Oh blessed elevator! Then a short stagger and I’m sitting on the red-velvet bench in the hotel elevator, no longer puzzled by why a hotel puts benches in elevators.